Savage Park: A Meditation on Play, Space, and Risk for Americans Who Are Nervous, Distracted, and Afraid to Die

As a visitor from New York City with her husband and two young sons, Amy Fusselman was startled, a little frightened and deeply fascinated by Tokyo's Hanegi playpark. "Play freely at your own risk" says the sign at the entrance to "Savage Park." Open fires burn and families toast marshmallows while children climb on ropes in the trees and undertake construction projects with scraps of building materials and available tools. While Hanegi playpark is in some ways reminiscent of the vacant lots where earlier generations of American children played with whatever was at hand, the setting--and the message--are unlike anything Fusselman had ever encountered. Savage Park is a document of Fusselman's fascination with this strange playground, which drew her back to Toyko a year later to spend a week working alongside its lead "play worker."

Fussleman's musings on cultural differences in the perceptions of "play" and "risk" lead to observations about how we engage with the space around us... and how we don't. The brief history of "adventure playgrounds" like Hanegi offered in Savage Park reveals that they are far more common in Europe and Japan than in the United States, and Fusselman suggests that the carefully constructed, padded structures in our play areas function at least as much in the interest of parents' psychological safety as for the physical safety of our children.

Illustrated with many black-and-white photographs of the place that inspired it, Savage Park blends Fusselman's thoughtful reflections with her passionate arguments for Americans to reevaluate our concepts of fear, space and creativity, much as her time in Tokyo's "Savage Park" caused her to reevaluate her own. --Florinda Pendley Vasquez, blogger at The 3 R's Blog: Reading, 'Riting, and Randomness

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